Hush (12 page)

The room was crowded, and it suddenly
occurred to her that Irving must have called her as an
afterthought. The experts were wrapping things up. All the
discussions had taken place. Party's over.

It was a group of professionals doing their
job. The medical examiner had apparently been there and gone. One
woman was snapping pictures, another running a video camera. Two
men, one in a suit, one in a black trench coat—probably officers
from the mobile crime-scene lab—were bagging evidence. Around their
necks hung white masks used to keep them from inhaling fingerprint
powder. Two other men, possibly the coroner and his assistant,
seemed to be waiting. Another man, Max Irving, stood over the bed.
He had a tablet in his gloved hands, taking notes.

He was wearing jeans.

Well. Thank God she'd dressed appropriately,
she thought, squelching a sense of hysteria that had been building
in her ever since she'd stepped into the building. Incongruous
thoughts come to a person at a time like this.

Because it really wasn't the jeans that
concerned her. It was what lay beyond the jeans, still within her
field of vision, but blurred. Like peering through the lens of a
camera, her depth of field grew and the background slowly came into
focus. Past those jeans she saw a woman's bare legs dangling from
the side of the bed, one foot almost touching the floor, the other
slightly higher.

She thought of the bonsai tree. She thought
of the woman crying behind the dark door.

Young legs. Pretty legs. Legs splattered with
blood.

The room smelled like a baby, like powder and
bath soap. It also smelled like blood, and urine, and feces.

Next to the bed was a white wicker bassinet
with a mobile attached.

White wicker.

She moved across the bedroom to the bassinet.
She looked inside.

The infant seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
Just lying there so sweetly. But upon closer inspection, she could
see a tinge of blue around his eyes, his lips, his tiny
fingernails.

"A boy?" she asked, knowing the answer.

Max looked up from his notebook, obviously
surprised to see that she'd gotten there so quickly. Or gotten
there at all.

"Yeah. Born a week ago. The mother is Sachi
Anderson. The grandmother, Sachi's mother, is downstairs giving a
statement."

The grandmother. So. That's who was sobbing
downstairs.

He reached into the back pocket of his jeans,
pulled out a pair of white latex gloves, and handed them to her.
Without comment, she took them and slipped them on.

Inside the bassinet, tucked near the foot of
the mattress, was a snow-globe music box. The killer's signature.
He always left a gift for the baby.

"Go ahead. We're done with the baby."

Done with the baby. As if the child were
nothing.

She lifted out the music box. Inside the
cheap glass globe was a mother holding an infant. Unfortunately
there was nothing very unique about it. It was something that would
have been mass-produced and sold fairly cheaply.

She found the mechanism at the bottom and
wound it just one turn, then released the catch. The tune was
familiar:

Hush little baby, don't say a word.

The camera finally stopped clicking. Orbs of
light floated in front of her.

"That's that," the photo deputy said. "Let's
roll her over."

They rolled the body over, then the camera
shutter began clicking again.

Ivy shut off the music box and put it in the
bassinet.

When she turned, the dead woman was on her
back, and the guy in the trench coat was bent over her. Ivy watched
as he cut strands of straight dark hair from the woman's head and
put them in an evidence bag. He did the same with her pubic hair.
Then he clipped her fingernails and put the clippings in a small
envelope, then a larger evidence bag.

"Be thorough, Ellis," Irving said
abruptly.

The guy in the trench coat looked up. He was
neatly groomed in a high-maintenance, expensive kind of way. Ivy
could immediately tell he wasn't used to being bossed around.

"Are you implying that I do half-assed work?"
Ellis asked.

"I just want you to know this case is
important."

"Haven't you read the rule book? All cases
are important." Ellis laughed sarcastically and Ivy caught a
glimpse of why Irving might not like him.

Their little altercation had been enough of a
distraction for Ivy to let down her guard, and now she could see
what she'd been afraid to notice before. The woman was nude, with
bruises on her wrists and ankles, and what looked like clothesline
cord around her neck. Her face was so swollen that it was
impossible to tell if she'd been beautiful. Worse than that, her
fixed eyes were open and her mouth had been Scotch taped into a
wide grin.

There were several stab wounds; the mattress
beneath the body was saturated with blood. The Madonna Murderer
always went for the womb. Of that, Ivy could offer proof.

She also knew that he killed the mothers out
of hatred—but he killed the infants out of love. A sick, twisted
love, but love all the same.

When the coroner pulled out a thermometer,
Ivy turned away. She couldn't watch. But it was all still there in
her mind, just like a photo. Just like the photos in the case file.
The grin. The glazed, pupil-filled eyes.

Time of death would be calculated by taking
the normal temperature of 98.6 minus the rectal temperature to come
up with the approximate number of hours since the death.

"Time of death, 11:15 P.M.," the coroner
announced.

She'd been dead less than three hours.

"11:30 P.M. for the infant."

Which meant the mother had fought to save her
baby. That she had fought the killer until she could fight no
more.

Irving must have been thinking the same
thing, because he looked up at a uniformed officer—a young,
dark-skinned policeman standing near the bedroom door. "I want all
units to be on the alert for a man with possible fresh scratch
marks on his face," he told him.

The body was lifted onto a gurney covered
with an unzipped black body bag, ready to be taken to the morgue
for autopsy. She was tucked in and the bag was zipped.

"What about the baby? Can't we just put it in
with the mother?" the assistant asked.

"It probably won't make any difference," the
guy Irving had been arguing with said. He looked at Irving. "But
for the sake of possible cross-contamination of evidence, give it
its own bag."

Which they did, with everybody there knowing
it was ridiculous, that the arrogant guy in the trench coat was
just doing it for Irving's sake. All Ivy could think of was that
he'd called the baby an "it."

Then they were gone.

The bodies.

The coroner.

The photographer.

The only people left were the two guys from
the mobile crime lab, Irving, and Ivy.

Ivy would have left immediately, but she
didn't want to have to see the bodies being put in the
ambulance.

She really didn't want to be in this bedroom
either.

The crime-lab guys continued to prowl around,
clipping here, dabbing there.

"Get the drains," Ellis said to his partner.
"And the toilet."

His partner straightened. He was young and
unremarkable. "Why don't you get the toilet? I got the toilet last
time."

Ellis stared at the younger man, whose eyes
finally broke contact as he moved away, out of the bedroom to
examine the toilet. Sometimes killers tried to flush things away,
and sometimes objects were found trapped in the bend of the toilet
bowl. Ivy felt a moment of sympathy, knowing that the young
technician was going to have to reach into the toilet searching for
possible evidence.

With him out of the picture, Ellis stopped in
front of her, looked her in the eye, and said, "What are you doing
here?" Over his shoulder to Irving he said, "What the hell's she
doing here? Every unnecessary person is one more set of footprints
closer to a compromised crime scene."

"She's supposed to be here," Irving said
wearily, his tone conveying that her presence was out of his
hands.

"What's your purpose?" Ellis asked.

There were very few people Ivy hated
immediately, but she hated this man. He made Irving look like a
damn saint, a damn bleeding heart.

She never broke eye contact, saying, "I'm
here to sell popcorn."

From Irving's direction came a snort of
laughter. Then again, maybe she was there for comic relief.

The guy continued to stare at her, passing a
pink- tipped tongue over his lips. Then he smiled and turned away
to continue combing the room for evidence.

Ivy followed him. "He's not an 'it,'" she
said.

The guy looked up.

"The baby," she explained firmly. "The baby's
not an 'it.'"

"What the hell's your problem?" In one gloved
hand, he held an evidence bag, in the other a blood- saturated
swab. He looked truly perplexed, unable to figure her out.

"These are real people," she said, gritting
her teeth so her lips wouldn't tremble. Words bounced off the walls
of her brain as she struggled to package her emotions so she could
find something that would make him understand even though she knew
it was useless. "You're dehumanizing them," she explained slowly.
"Just like the killer."

He continued to stare at her blankly, his
mouth slack, his head tilted, his shoulders hunched in a what-
did-I-do pose.

Recognizing the futility of what she was
trying to communicate, she pushed past him and walked out of the
bedroom.

As she moved through the living room, she
wouldn't let herself look in the direction of the bonsai.

Out. She had to get out.

Soon she was outside, pulling in huge gulps
of air, her heart pounding, her mind unable to shut off the images
of the grinning mother, the blue-tinged baby.

A camera flash went off in her face,
momentarily blinding her. Someone grabbed her arm. "Can you tell me
about the murder?" a male voice asked.

Ivy blinked, finally able to make out the
young reporter who'd stopped Irving in the lobby that first day.
"You'll have to talk to Detective Irving," she said, pulling her
arm away.

Suddenly there was a little flurry of
activity as an officer realized the reporter was inside the crime-
scene tape.

"Get the hell out of there," the female
officer yelled, striding over.

The reporter scrambled under the tape,
disappearing into the darkness.

Ivy ducked under the tape, walked a few
yards, and there he was again, talking fast. Right in front of her,
tablet in hand, pen poised. "A female. I know that," he said. "An
infant," he said urgently. "I have to know if there was an
infant."

"I can't talk about it."

"What about you? What's your involvement in
the case?"

She stopped and let out an indignant breath.
"I can't tell you that either." A little warning flag went up.
Can't tell. Poor choice of words. Damn poor choice.

"Listen—" She put a hand to her forehead,
then her hair—and realized she hadn't even brushed it before
hopping in the cab. Not that it mattered. A woman was dead. A baby
was dead. Her hair deserved no thought. If she were Catholic, she
would have made herself say one hundred Hail Marys.

"Oh, forget it." She shoved him out of the
way, saying as she passed him, "Talk to Irving."

Is this what happened when you lived alone
for too long? You found everybody irritating? First Irving, then
Ellis, now this reporter. Was her judgement skewed? Or was she
seeing people the way they really were? Either way, it was
disturbing, unpleasant. In the last hour, she'd had enough reality
to last her sixteen more years.

She kept walking, and thank God he didn't
follow.

She hadn't thought about how she would get
home, otherwise she would have asked her earlier ride to return for
her. There were no cabs around, and she had no way to get back to
her apartment without one. She kept walking, knowing it wasn't safe
and yet also knowing there was enough activity in the area, enough
police and gawkers, to make the dangers of walking in a bad area of
town late at night not any more dangerous than walking there at
noon.

She'd gone possibly two blocks when a siren
let out a little squawk. She turned to see a police car gliding
beside her. The passenger window silently opened and the young
officer she'd seen speaking with Irving earlier leaned across the
seat so he could look up at her.

"Detective Irving told me to give you a
lift."

"I can find my own ride." She could see
lights in the distance—hopefully an all-night gas station where she
could use the phone.

"I've got my orders," he said in a
half-teasing, half- serious way.

What difference did it make?

She opened the door and got in, giving him
her address.

It was almost light when Alex Martin left the
loft he shared with two other guys in the River North district of
what was rapidly becoming known as "the" place to be, a trendy area
where the rent was high and a lot of people his age lived. It was a
place where warehouses had been converted into apartments with
huge, curtainless windows, wooden floors, and room for parties of
several hundred.

Outside the subway entrance, he grabbed a
copy of the Herald before catching the Red Line. It wasn't yet rush
hour, and there were plenty of places to sit. He took a seat and
unfolded the paper, smoothing the center crease. At one time there
had been some discussion about the Herald going to a more
user-friendly tabloid format, but they'd eventually decided against
it. No matter how accurate and well written the articles, the
tabloid presentation had a tacky stigma that would have been
impossible to rise above, and the Herald prided itself in its
credibility.